A Week Of #GoodNews

Full throttle for DeFi: banking and investing are accelerating at ‘warp speed’

“A seismic shift is underway in the financial markets,” writes Lawrence Wintermeyer on Forbes. He explains: “Decentralized Finance, or DeFi, is becoming increasingly important to millions of people as they leave the traditional centralized financial institutions (CeFi) that have until now dominated activities including investing, loans, savings accounts and even regular checking accounts and merchant services. The total value accrued (locked) across all DeFi projects, the biggest of which include Celsius, BlockFi, Yearn Finance, and others, has surged dramatically this year from $700 million early in the year to a record high of $14 billion.” This is great news for GoodDollar supporters, because we are all about decentralization. (See our governance plans – moving to the GoodDAO – in our white paper.)

European nations switch on to basic income because of ‘game-changer’ COVID-19

CNN looks across the Atlantic Ocean and spies a number of countries more openminded about basic income than they were less than a year ago. The piece notes that in Scotland, Germany, England and Austria – among others – politicians are willing to give basic income a chance, having been given the opportunity to rethink economic systems because of the coronavirus chaos. “COVID-19 has been a game-changer,” says Christine Jardine, a member of the Liberal Democrats party, and who was not a fan of basic income before the pandemic hit. “It was regarded in some quarters as a kind of socialist idea … [But now] we’ve seen the suggestion of a universal basic income in a completely different light.” Naturally, the GoodDollar team is delighted that more people – especially those in positions in power – across the world are willing to promote basic income, which can be traced back to Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia. It’s not so utopian now, is it?

Assessing the case for basic income in India

As mentioned above, the momentum towards basic income is gathering speed every day, and throughout the coronavirus pandemic many countries have embraced it as a mechanism to keep citizens out of the poverty trap, albeit temporarily. India, the world’s second-most-populous country with 1.4 billion people, is suffering badly from the virus. So this Georgetown Public Policy review assesses whether basic income would be successful in India is timely, and well worth a read. The piece concludes: “Even though the conversation around basic income and its implementation has a relatively complex past, the current time does genuinely call for special consideration, a sentiment echoed by many in a nation undergoing extraordinarily trying times.”

Goodbye coins – hello digital era

The coronavirus fallout has also sped up the move to a cashless society, reports The New York Times. Clearly, digital wallets – just like GoodDollar’s basic income wallet – are the way forward. “By upending normal habits, the pandemic has dropped [coins] out of circulation and accelerated a trend toward cards, apps and other cashless payments that could eventually make coins obsolete,” the piece states. “China has plans for a digital currency, and the U.S. Federal Reserve is doing ‘research and experimentation‘. Facebook has a currency in the works, and Bitcoin’s evangelists are still preaching.” Amen to that.

Bitcoin Bill lifts the lid on ’30 other billionaires’ who made their fortune in crypto

According to Cryptonews there are 10s of Bitcoin billionaires who have not revealed the source of their fortune, so says “Twitter Philanthropist” Bill Pulte – aka Bitcoin Bill. Given the bull run that cryptos are on right now, perhaps those lucky people would be minded to help others out, as we do at GoodDollar, where our mission is to reduce global wealth inequality.

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